Social Media

Web Mashup Lets Your Track Your Favorite Bands

Rabid, obsessive fans take note: A new service, akin to Google Reader/Google Alert for bands, has launched. Let my full-fledged stalking of David Bowie commence.

Fanity, an Amsterdam-based startup that launched at the Midem Conference in Cannes, France, is a new web service designed to help you track your favorite artists. Fanity is pretty easy to navigate — simply create an account and start searching for your favorite bands. You can also connect to Twitter and Facebook (among other social sites) to find bands on Fanity. That function seems a little buggy; I was able to pull my favorite bands from Facebook, but somehow the service wasn't able to grab any of the musicians I follow on Twitter (and I follow a lot).

Band information is then added to a dashboard, where you can then check out a stream of content, organized into artists, blogs, videos, photos, lyrics, tweets and celebrity dialogues. Again, there were some bugs here, as I wasn't able to see any tweets from bands I followed — instead, this message appeared: "No content found for your stream. You must be fan of very obscure artists or we are having an issue with our code which is more likely. You could check out our Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga Fan stream, since they must have content ;)."

No, thank you, Fanity. I would rather not.

On the whole, Fanity could be a fun tool for hardcore music fans and bloggers alike — you can also receive e-mail updates detailing artist news. And, apparently, Fanity allows artists to link their Fanity account with their artist stream to better reach fans — so there's the opportunity of enhanced publicity as well.

Still, a ton of bugs still need to be squashed in order for this tool to truly be useful — unless you really dig Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, that is.

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